Advent: Hope and Expectation

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“The days are coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise.” Did the Lord promise us an easy life? “Pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.” What do we expect from the Lord? What is our hope about?

1.  The disciples of Emmaus were disappointed because they were hoping for the wrong thing: “We had hoped, they said, that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel.” But they were hoping for a temporal, visible liberation, obtained by means of divine “powers.” Not only were the Romans still in power but they also had killed the messiah. The miraculous powers of Jesus and his popular influence had not been enough to liberate the Jewish from the Romans: the Romans had overpowered Jesus, and He was now dead.

Jesus was actually speaking to them, alive and kicking. He had liberated them from the power of sin and hell, and from the power of the devil. Jesus had destroyed death in Himself, as the first fruits, and in some other people who had raised with Him that day. But He had destroyed sin and death, not by a human show of power, but by human weakness; not by the power of weapons but by the power of love; not with the power of anger but with the power of tears and prayers. Yes, the divine power had destroyed death and raised Him from the tomb but, in this way, He had marked the way of Christian redemption, which is the way of the Cross.

There is no victory without fight, and no Resurrection without Cross. Liberation does not come from power but from suffering or, better said, liberation comes from the power of a love that no human weapon can overpower. Christian love, stronger than death, faithful and perseverant till the end, that love is what liberates human beings from sin, from hell, from the devil and eventually from death itself.

2.  We Christians hope for two things only: we hope for grace in this life and for God in the other life. We hope for Heaven and the means to attain Heaven. We hope for the reward of the saints in Heaven and, on earth, for the love that makes us saints, for that love that makes us stronger than any human power and any human suffering. We hope for perfect happiness in Heaven and for the greatest possible happiness on earth. In fact, there is no happiness without love, there is no joy without love. Joy is gone when you lose what you love: this is why there is no greater joy than the joy coming from loving God, because nothing and nobody can separate us from Him.

3.  Many Christians nowadays are disappointed. They see that evil advances in human society and there seems to be no way back. They see a Church too weak to offer solutions for the advance of evil. They had hoped that God would give peace to the world, they had hoped that the Church would change human culture for the better, they had hoped that God would help them to get a good life for themselves and their families, health instead of illness, peace instead of anxieties, joy instead of suffering… We are disappointed, as if our God were dead and we were alone before the power of death.

Jesus is not dead. I wish we could see Him today, speaking to us… Jesus never promised an easy life but He also never said that our lives would be boring. Jesus repeatedly told us that we would have to suffer but He never said we would not be happy. He left us peace, but not the peace of the world. Perhaps we are disappointed because we were hoping for worldly peace, not for Jesus’ peace.

4.  We do not hope for evil but for good. We do not hope for suffering, but for the grace to overcome suffering. We hope for that faith that will give meaning to our suffering, for that love that will make light all our burdens, for that joy that comes from hope, even in the middle of suffering… Whoever suffers in faithfulness and love, rejoices in the realization that, through the cross, he is coming closer to the perfect happiness of Heaven. This is, finally, the main object of our hope: we hope for the perfect good, for the perfect happiness, one that cannot be better and that, once obtained, cannot be lost, which is Heaven. Nothing else deserves our hope. If you hope for something of this world, you will be disappointed, and your hope will die with you. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy” (Matthew 6:20).

5.  When we have this hope, we can actually change the world. When we have this hope, we can actually change the Church for the better. They say that the best soldiers are those who think they are already dead, and so the only think they care about is the next brave thing they can do to win the war. Nobody can stop you if your hope is in God. Nobody can stop you if you want to do God’s will. God will always give you the power to do whatever He asks you to do, and no human power will be able to bend your freedom. They can kill only your body, not your hope.

We have been promised a perfect happiness, and we have been promised everything we need to achieve it. Let us work for it. Jesus works with us, side by side, sharing our yoke and making it light. What do we expect from life? What do we hope for? What do we expect from God? Something worldly, material, fleeting…? Or God’s love and grace? What do we want, happiness or disappointment? May God kindle in us the light of hope, a light so bright that we may always rejoice in hope and be never disappointed.